its just a guess, as the type of virus is a polymorphic worm/spreader trojan according to virustotal. and they would have had to gain access to prymordiums stuff to reupload the bad copy within the last year. and sadly this current bad copy can perform numerous actions (steal passwords, encrypt files, eat space, log keystrokes etc etc and infect other neighboring exe files on the drives) its all able to be done automatically or upon the bad actors request. idk why the artist has been missing for so long which is concerning as there was a small team of +5 people making this game (prymordium has been missing +2 years it appears? on the digging i did on gamejolts website) which is concerning and i hope they are ok, but i do know this game never had a virus in it before until last year and the dev and artists worked very hard on it and its all unfair to them and the users that download it in its current condition. it will give them a bad name and reputation
on gamejolt there was supposed to be a chapter two, but theres been no updates since 2 years ago....
if i had to guess on what happened, the developers machine was compromised by a bad actor on discord (which happens alot with the social engineering tactic of "hey freind! ive been working on this game or try my new game yada yada") which then other devs will check it out unknowing that they actually infected their machine because their freind was also compromised by the same way and the infection spreads like cancer via both social engineering and exe.
i still am clueless on why they and others have not reached out on itch io, maybe this really is an abandoned project and they all forgot about it, sadly. i hope not, maybe developments just going hella hella slow. but cool fact is lead programmer was a guest on doctor who as a editorial consultant it appears, i was actually gonna try to email everyone i could to sort out this mess. as a dev myself i would want someone to help me make things right for others if somthing went wrong like this to me. but im keeping an eye out and gonna try to contact everyone i can about this that made the game....
to play a clean copy download the 2018 copy of simulacrum from here https://archive.org/details/simulacrum-chapter-one-1.2.1
the real devs original simulacrum exe should always be 625kb with a md5 hash of : 5580ddf75fbaf58cbdcee0efebe4a14
Thanks to your follow, I was able to take swift action and update my collection entries for this game accordingly. Now when users run into it, there will be a warning that should redirect them to an alternative download that isn’t compromised.
